ChalkBrood

[prakel]

I'll stress, to begin with that I'm not attempting to make an argument for importation:

In 1998 I sent 400 colonies to Florida for wintering, under the care of another beekeeper. They came home rotten and stinky with chalk. To this day, the worst chalkbrood I have ever seen. I re-queened with a strain of Carniolan that had been selected for their degree of hygienic-ness by using liquid nitrogen. My God! These bees cleaned up chalkbrood like nothing you have ever seen. In not much more than a month, colonies that had piles of chalk mummies on the bottom board were mummy free. Since incorporating those bees into my program, chalkbrood has all but disappeared in my apiaries. I now use chalkbrood...or lack of chalkbrood...in my breeding program. I see a handful of chalk colonies every summer but that's among more than a thousand colonies and nucs.

I have to agree that imported stock isn't necessary. The hygienic trait is surely present in your UK stocks, and you just have to select for it.

Mike, there's a practical limitation which you yourself plainly acknowledged -as individuals we need to bring in the stock to work from in the first place OR to spend an unspecified period of time selecting for the required traits within our existing colonies.

As things stand although there are people working towards hygienic selection in the UK the simple reality is that commercially available stock choice is very limited in both accessibility and quantity.

Publicly available follow up reviews of their performance in the field are even rarer than the queens themselves. The water's are still very muddy at present.

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Out of nothing more than idle curiosity, were the carnica you mention here, the Karnica line which you've mentioned elsewhere with regards to temper issues or a different source?

[prakel]

Another thought; I wonder how many of us in the past, brought up on the solid brood pattern ideal, have unwittingly destroyed naturally occurring hygienic lines instead of taking the time to observe why a particular colony isn't meeting that 'standard'? It can be just too easy to cull a queen -only takes a second.

[mbc]

Another thought; I wonder how many of us in the past, brought up on the solid brood pattern ideal, have unwittingly destroyed naturally occurring hygienic lines instead of taking the time to observe why a particular colony isn't meeting that 'standard'? It can be just too easy to cull a queen -only takes a second.

It's something that occured to me, that what some people are heavily selecting for would be thrown out by others, I think though that the cream will always rise to the top.